It is probable that the time of governments' wishing to control literature is past. What we are faced with now is the frightening authority of great,… - Shulamith Hareven

Writing, real writing, has very little to do with so-called typical behavior. It must be whittled down from our familiar spheres of reference to what the person actually is and does; in good writing, no person is "typical."

Our history is not only the history of a people, but also the history of a language...Some parts of our tradition are widely known; others are less known because it is so difficult to translate from Hebrew. Whole theories were built upon incorrect translations from Hebrew. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill," as most translations have it, does not exist in the Bible. The original commandment is "Thou shalt not murder," which is entirely different. A whole ethos has been created in other cultures because of a fallacious translation of a commandment written originally in Hebrew.

This writer said in October 1967, in an article in Ha'aretz, that if we hold on to the territories, the first consequence will be that we will start lying to ourselves. That is exactly what happened, very rapidly, and that is what is happening today, when a weak population, deprived of citizenship and rights, lacking arms and the means to defend itself, is claiming its rights-a claim that is consonant with the Israeli social interest itself-but is reflected in our warped mirror as actually threatening the existence of the state. Not only an outsider will have trouble understanding this; so will the historian of the future. The worst of it is that these tribal mythologies leave us with no alternative, no scale of possibilities, no prospect of culture, no choice of identity-except to be either murderers, the murdered, or both. As though Israel had no other identity. As though, in the biggest lie of all, this were Judaism. ("Israel: The First Forty Years")